My guest today is Andrew Papachristos, one of the smartest people (though he is a Bears fan) thinking through how to use data to reduce gun violence. Andy has spent his career trying to read networks more systematically. He’s a professor at Northwestern University who studies how social ties and relationships shape who becomes a victim and who doesn’t and how that knowledge can be put to use before the next shooting, not just after.

In this episode, we get into what network science actually is, how cities are using it to reach people at the highest risk, and why the same principles hold whether you're looking at Boston, New Haven, Newark, or Chicago. We also talk about what it actually looks like when violence intervention workers use this research well and what the current historic crime decline might be obscuring.

Andrew Papachristos is the John G. Searle Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, where he directs the Institute for Policy Research and CORNERS—the Center for Neighborhood Engaged Research & Science. His (insert adjective :P ) research uses network science and multi-method approaches to understand gun violence, gun markets, street gangs, and policing. He is one of the country's leading experts on how network dynamics shape gun violence and public safety.

My guest today is Insha Rahman, the president of the Vera Institute of Justice, the oldest and largest justice reform organization in the country. Insha has spent the past ten years building out everything from bail reform research to a 501c4 focused squarely on the politics of public safety and brings a fascinating perspective to the conversation around making perceptions of crime and safety more responsive to what the data says is actually happening.

In this episode, we get into why the data behind reforms like bail reform rarely matches the political story told about them, what cities like Camden, NJ got right during their first homicide-free summer in fifty years, and why Insha thinks the gap between crime perception and crime reality might finally be starting to close.

Insha Rahman is the president and director of the Vera Institute of Justice, the oldest and largest criminal justice reform organization in the country. Insha is also the president and director of Vera Action, an independent 501(c)(4) organization. Insha is the first woman, immigrant, and Muslim to lead both organizations. Insha previously served as Vera’s vice president for Advocacy and Partnerships and the director of Vera Action since 2020. Insha got her start in this work as a public defender in the Bronx.

Crime is falling fast in America , and, as the many different opinions on the podcast can attest, almost nobody can agree on why.

My guest today has spent thirty years inside the question of America’s changing crime trends, first as a researcher at the Urban Institute, now as director of the Center on Public Safety at NORC.

John Roman has a theory about what actually drove the violence spike of 2020, and an even more specific theory about what’s driving the decline now, one that has less to do with new policing tactics and a lot more to do with $300 billion in pandemic relief money that quietly rebuilt the social infrastructure we lost.

In this episode, we talk about why the usual explanations for crime trends –  more cops, more task forces, more local initiatives, don’t hold up against the data. We get into the role police legitimacy potentially played after George Floyd, why the decline has lasted so long, and what the future might look like.

John K. Roman, Ph.D. is a senior fellow in the Economics, Justice, and Society Department and directs the Center for Public Safety and Justice at NORC at the University of Chicago.  His research focuses on the economics of innovative crime and justice policies and programs, cost-benefit methodology, and systems reforms, including justice system interactions with substance abuse, public health, adolescent development, housing, workforce development, and education. Dr. Roman has conducted research on behalf of numerous state and local governments, foundations, and federal agencies.

Today's guest is Andy Wheeler, a renowned criminologist, data scientist, and founder of Crime Decoder. Andy is a terrific voice for understanding the role of technology in analyzing and decreasing crime.

We talk through Andy’s work with police departments, including crime trend monitoring,  predictive analytics, focused deterrence, and the challenge of turning data into useful operational decisions. We also discuss the practical realities of artificial intelligence in criminal justice. Rather than focusing on the hype around AI replacing workers or transforming society overnight, Andy walks through how these tools are actually being used today: helping analysts write code, automate repetitive work, build dashboards, and make better use of messy public safety data.

This is a great conversation about how the future of criminal justice analysis is already here.

Andrew P. Wheeler, PhD and founder of CRIME De-Coder, collaborates with police departments across the United States on custom software and data analytics. His work focuses on predictive analytics, operations research, and policy analysis. See his firm and other resources at https://crimede-coder.com/.

Andy also has a recent book, *Large Language Models for Mortals: A Practical Guide for Analysts with Python*, https://crimede-coder.com/blogposts/2026/LLMsForMortals

My guest today has an incredible new documentary coming out this November called Crime and Punishment in America. It's a four-part, 8 hour review of the history of crime and incarceration dating back hundreds of years all the way to today (I was fortunate enough to get a preview). 

Lynn Novick (The Vietnam War, College Behind Bars, The Us and the Holocaust) is the writer and director of this terrific new documentary and she sat down with me to talk about everything from where the idea to cover such an expansive subject came from to what it's like working with such tremendous talent to make history come to life. 

This conversation is a great look into documenting the complexities of the American criminal justice system. Give it a listen and be sure to catch the new film when it comes out in a few months!

Lynn Novick has been making landmark documentary films about American life and culture, history, politics, sports, art, architecture, literature, and music for more than 30 years. As director and producer, she has created more than 100 hours of acclaimed programming for PBS in collaboration with Ken Burns, including most recently their six-hour series, The U.S. and The Holocaust, (co-directed and produced by Sarah Botstein) which received the Alfred I. DuPont Columbia Award and the Television Academy Honors award. Novick’s films  include The Vietnam War, Ernest Hemingway, Prohibition, Baseball, Jazz, Frank Lloyd Wright, and The War --  these landmark series have garnered 19 Emmy nominations. Novick herself has received DuPont, Emmy and Peabody Awards. 

When crime rises, the instinct is usually to hire more officers, increase enforcement, and ask police departments to do even more. But after spending years investigating police departments and working on reform efforts across the country, my guest today has started asking a different question…

What if we’re asking policing to do too much in the first place?

Christy Lopez is a professor at Georgetown Law, former DOJ Civil Rights Division attorney, and one of the leading voices on policing reform and alternative public safety responses.

In this episode, we talk about the limits of traditional police reform, why consent decrees have struggled to produce lasting change, and what it would look like to build a more diversified public safety ecosystem instead of relying almost entirely on law enforcement.

Christy Lopez is a Professor at Georgetown Law, where she teaches courses on policing, criminal procedure, and civil rights, and is the Faculty Director of Georgetown's Center for Innovations in Community Safety. Prior to going to Georgetown in 2017, she was at the U.S. Department of Justice where she led the Division's group conducting pattern-or-practice investigations of law enforcement agencies.

One of the hardest things for any mayor to do is convince people that a problem can actually be solved.

That may sound obvious, but when a city has struggled with violence for decades, cynicism starts to set in. Residents get frustrated. Headlines get harsher. And people assume that high levels of violence are simply part of life.

My guest today rejects that idea.

Quinton Lucas has served as mayor of Kansas City since 2019, a period that included both record levels of violence and, more recently, significant declines in homicides and shootings across the city .

In this episode, we talk about how Kansas City approached violence reduction and how to communicate complex solutions to an intractable problem.

Born and raised in Kansas City's inner city, Quinton Lucas serves as the 55th mayor of Kansas City, the youngest person elected to the role since 1855. Recognizing the importance of safety in our communities, Mayor Lucas serves as national chair for criminal justice efforts in the United States Conference of Mayors and as an advocate to reduce gun violence on America's streets as co-chair of Mayors Against Illegal Guns. 

“We should treat gun violence like a public health problem” is a phrase that is often used but rarely defined. 

My guest today is Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency physician, injury prevention researcher, and the Dean of the Yale School of Public Health .

She sees firearm injury as part of a much broader health issue, one that affects not just the person who was shot, but families, communities, health care providers, and the systems that are supposed to respond afterward.

In this episode, we talk about what a public health approach to firearm injury actually means, why that framework is often misunderstood, and how public health researchers think about prevention differently from the way these conversations usually happen in politics or media.

Dr. Megan Ranney is Dean of the Yale School of Public Health, a practicing emergency physician, and leading voice for innovative approaches to public health. For more than two decades, she has worked on the frontlines of emergency medicine, caring for patients impacted by firearm injuries, overdoses, and other preventable crises while advocating for solutions that bridge science, policy, and public trust. Her work focuses on rebuilding the connection between science and society and advancing evidence-based solutions that help people live longer, healthier lives.

The national conversation around gun violence tends to revolve around what laws should be passed next. But a lot of the work of reducing violence doesn’t happen in Congress. It happens in cities, hospitals, community organizations, police departments, schools, and increasingly through coordination between all of them.

My guest today is Rob Wilcox, the president and CEO of the Fund for a Safer Future and the former deputy director of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention.

In this episode, we talk about what it was like helping build such a critical office from the ground up, how he tried to approach gun violence as more than just a legislative issue, what happens when the federal government starts thinking about violence reduction as an operational challenge instead of simply a political one, and what the future of gun violence prevention should look like.

Rob Wilcox joined the Fund for a Safer Future in 2026 as its first President & CEO. He previously served as co-deputy director of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention in the Biden-Harris Administration, where he built a track record of turning evidence-informed strategies into real-world results. In that role, he led the implementation of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act and helped to shape over 50 executive actions. Prior to his White House service, Wilcox served in a senior role at Everytown for Gun Safety, where he worked on state and federal legislative efforts. His personal connection to the issue—his cousin Laura was killed in a workplace shooting in 2001—has driven his commitment to evidence-informed solutions for more than two decades.

Fund for a Safer Future is a national network of over 30 funders pooling expertise and resources to help end gun violence. FSF is making grants to support policy, research, communications, and community-led efforts that save lives. The collaborative model brings more funders into the movement, lifts evidence-informed solutions, and backs the organizations working every day to keep communities safe.

For decades, the response to rising crime has been fairly predictable: increase penalties, increase sentences, and hope it works. My guest today says that framework misses the point.

Greg Newburn is the Director of Criminal Justice at the Niskanen Center, where his work focuses on reducing both crime and punishment at the same time through evidence-based policy .

In this episode, we talk about why the criminal justice system may have been built around the wrong theory of deterrence, why certainty matters more than severity, and what it would look like to design a system focused less on increasing punishment and more on increasing the likelihood that crimes are actually solved.

Greg Newburn is director of criminal justice at the Niskanen Center. His previous positions include state policy director and Florida director for FAMM and chair of the Florida-based 'Yes on 11' political committee. He is a graduate of the University of Florida and the University of Florida Levin College of Law.